Good evening everyone on this rainy night. I was traveling on I94 today going to a pumpkin farm in Racine Wisconsin. And I saw a flat bed truck going the other way and it was a oversized load. At first I did not see what it was until it was passed me. It was a box car laying on it’s side without the. Trucks on it but it had the couplers on it and it looked like a 45 foot or even a 60 foot box and it was high enough to hang off of the trailer by about 6 or 7 feet and it had to travel in the right lane because of the height of the car. But I’m wondering was it in a wreck and it was on it’s way to get repaired or what from what. I saw it did not look like it had any damage but then again. I did not see it until it passed then it hit me that it was a box car on it’s side. It would be kinda interesting to find out where the car was heading or where it was coming from and how they got through the toll ways to get into wisconsin. Huh all of these questions to be answered.
Well, that’s a lot of trouble to go to, removing the trucks and complying with one (or two) states’ highway regulations for big loads. Pity you only got a brief look. Perhaps the boxcar has some significance like carrying a fresh-looking fallen flag logo. Or perhaps it was of an age to be vintage and is going to some museum or tourist line (Ill. Rwy. Museum has both, as do many others).
I guess we couldn’t rule out routine storage or shelter, but increasingly that need, such as it is, seems to be met by shipping cubes. Come to think of it, I don’t recall the last time I saw a 60-foot boxcar without any graffiti on it.
There must be other possiblities . . . guys, gals? - a.s.
Well there are a couple of prominent railroad museums with operating equipment in Wisconsin and neighboring states, so it could be going to one of them. It might have been bought by a private company or even an individual (like a farmer) to be converted into a shed or storage building of some kind.
Country singer Merle Haggard grew up in a house made from a boxcar - his Dad was a railroad worker and got a good deal on an old wooden car. Maybe the new owner is going to convert it to a lake cabin…there are thousands of cabins in Wisconsin owned by people from Chicago or the Twin Cities who go there every summer weekend or holiday.
It’s easy to remove the trucks on a freight car; lift the body and the trucks are right there on the tracks.
So when you see a movie train wreck, and the falling and fallen cars still have trucks, you know models were used; the ‘special effects’ crew were at work again.
Art
A box car to repaired or reused would not be shipped on it side, it seems to me the car is moving to be dismantled (cut up). We get cars this way quite often, both by truck and flat car. Chances are the underframe has some serious defect and the car could not be moved on its own trucks. Just a quess on my part.
Its not cheap buying them either , the price of scrap iron has driven the price up to about $10,000.00 ea … far cry from a few years ago when you could buy them for a couple grand…
A few years ago, UP sold about 100 boxcars for scrap from Pocatello. Every one of them was hauled away by truck - on its side on a flatbed. State of Idaho did well on oversized load permits that year.
dd
When the Prairie Trunk gave up on the ex-B&O branch to Shawneetown, Illinois, several covered hoppers were stranded south of Flora Illinois and were carried out, on their sides, on lowboys to be scrapped.
As for the tollway, they probably took US 41 south to the end of the tollway, and then back onto I 94. Such large loads are not usually allowed onto the Illinois tollway system.
Which is a good thing for the Tollway. About a month ago we drove from northside Chicago to downtown Kenosha, and the Tollway with its lane reductions and merges was by far the worst part of the drive.
Hope it will stop come freezing weather! - a.s.